Seeking mental health support for feelings of perinatal depression and/or anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative descriptive study of decision-making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Rates of perinatal depression and anxiety increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced risk perception and help-seeking behaviours among pregnant and postpartum individuals. OBJECTIVES: To explore pregnant and postpartum individuals' decision-making process about when and how to seek support for feelings of depression and/or anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. DESIGN: A qualitative descriptive design was used. METHODS: The current study is a secondary analysis of qualitative data collected for a larger mixed-methods project that recruited participants who gave birth from 1 May 2020, to 1 December 2021, in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, using maximum variation and purposive sampling. Seventy-three semi-structured interviews were conducted over Zoom or telephone. This analysis focuses on 56 individuals who discussed their self-identified feelings of prenatal or postpartum depression and/or anxiety. Conventional (inductive) content analysis was employed with iterative stages of open coding, focused coding and cross-checking themes. RESULTS: Most participants recognized their need to seek help for their feelings of depression and/or anxiety through discussions with a mental health professional or someone within their social circle. Nearly all participants accessed informal social support for these feelings, which sometimes entailed social contact in contravention of local COVID-19 public health policies. Many also attempted to access formal mental healthcare, encountering barriers both related and unrelated to the pandemic. Participants described the pandemic as having the dual effect of causing or exacerbating their feelings of depression and/or anxiety while also constraining their ability to access timely professional care. CONCLUSION: Participants struggled to address their feelings of perinatal depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many describing a lack of readily available resources and limited access to professional mental healthcare. This study highlights the need for improved provision of instrumental mental health support for pregnant and postpartum populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".